How to Capitalize Letters In Google Sheets By Formula Or Shortcuts

I’m sometimes surprised of how seemingly simple jobs like changing case become a long and complicated process. When I started to work in sheets I thought there must be a simple way to capitalize letters in Google sheets, to just choose a range of cells and change their case. While there are several ways to change case in sheets none of them are as easy as they could be.

So which options do we have available?

1. The 3 ways built in to spreadsheets
2. Using a script, or add-on
3. Changing case using keyboard shortcuts

Let’s go over the four options, but not to bury the lead the fourth Is by far the easiest one. If you want to select a range and use a shortcut or window to convert your text from lowercase to uppercase that’s on number four

Capitalize Letters In Google Sheets Using A Formula

The three built in solutions Google sheets comes with our formula based, One function that we have available is the “UPPER” That goes like this

This lets you change the content of a cell to uppercase one cell at a time

1. First you select a cell to work on
2. Then between the quotation marks enter the text you would like to change from lowercase to uppercase

=UPPER("Text to uppercase")

Notice that that this only changed the text in the cell you are currently working on, you can also Uppercase a cell in another location like this

=UPPER(B2)

Where you place the code In any empty cell you want, and define the destination you would like to be uppercased, in this example B2. The third method is to convert to uppercase on a range of cells, and that option uses an array, and goes like this.

=ArrayFormula(UPPER(B1:B55))

From the built in ways this may be the most useful one, but the major disadvantage is that you’ll need a dedicated column to perform this action, as the entire range will appear below your current selected cell (the one you have entered the formula in)

As I came to find out there are built in ways, but they’re mostly useless for my needs, I wanted to select a range of cells, use a shortcut or menu and just convert the entire range to uppercase in one go.

Use A Script To Change Case

There is a way to use a script to do case conversions for ranges of cells in Google spreadsheet, but it’s a bit advanced as you need to use what is called a “Apps script”.

If you’re comfortable working with the script area you can use this approach

1. First choose Tools > Apps script.
2. A new editor window will open, Now get the script you need from this forum post 
3. The only script you have you can replace the entire area with that script. You already have a script there you will need some development know how to add it to your existing script.
4. Now Save the script you have entered and return to your Spreadsheet
5. Reload the Spreadsheet Page
6. A new Menu item will appear to the right of the “Help” menu called “Case changer”, you can select a range and use one of the options inside.

Note that when you try to convert the case of a range of cells for the first time you will notice several warnings from Google, asking for privileges and access to your document. Read Google’s warnings and make sure you understand the type of Google sheets access you will be giving.

Well script have some privileges requests, add-ons will actually take it a step further and will require your personal information, if you choose to capitalize letters in google sheets using an add-on.

Changing Case Of A Cell Or A Range Of Cells Using Keyboard Shortcuts

Changing a cell or a range of cells in Google sheets using a shortcut is by far the easiest method of quickly selecting and converting between capitalizations, Google sheets does not come with prebuilt shortcuts, for that we will need to add AnyCase App, and as its name implies It is a case changer that supports hundreds of programs, and Google sheets is one of them. The advantage of adding any case to your toolset are:

• All conversions are done in place, no extra column is necessary like the “=UPPER..” method.
• You can use keyboard shortcut to converts case, that means selecting a range of cells and just using the combination Win+Alt+U will change the selected range to uppercase.
• Another great thing is that you can define your own shortcuts for lowercase, sentence case Etc. It doesn’t need to be the ones listed below (you do that in the setting)
• There’s no warnings or requests for privileges, as AnyCase does not have, or requests access to your Google Sheets files.